Cahokians designed their city to reflect a fascination with astronomy. People at Cahokia tracked the movements of the stars, moon, and sun, often orienting their homes to the positions of these cosmic bodies in the sky. During the city’s biggest population expansion, its street grid was aligned to be exactly 5 degrees off the north-south axis. Pauketat and his colleagues believe it is oriented toward an astronomical phenomenon called the lunar standstill,13 during which the moon’s altitude in the night sky rises and falls dramatically during a two-week period.
